Insurance Marketing Old School
Insurance Blog was gazing through some very old travel guides when we noticed that Insurance Marketing has come a long way since the start of Insurance….
This old advertisement for The London Assurance Company from the turn of 19th century suggests that insurance was something that you didn’t talk about in public – like money!
‘Very good people to deal with” What’s all that about then?
Good at what? Deal with What?
“Good Day Mister. I’m from London Assurance. We’ll deal with it for you! (Cockney Accent required)
An interesting thing about the advert is the Firemark in the centre depicting the coat of arms of the Corporation of the City of London, The George Cross.
Also notice the EC4 address which is still very much an Insurance area of the City.
For those of you who don’t know what a fire mark is, a Firemark was a plaque that was placed on the exterior of a property in full public view to indicate to the privately owned fire brigades that the house was covered by home insurance and was worth saving.
If you didn’t have a firemark on your wall and your house caught fire – then it burnt!
Fortunately the days of proving you’ve got home insurance before the Fire Brigade will start putting out the fire, are long gone. Fire Marks though now very collectable, were the very first form of Insurance Marketing and advertising.
By the 1920′s advertising for Home Insurance and property insurance had moved on with the emphasis on courtesy, service and prompt settlement as this fascinating advert from the still existing Eagle Star Company, now part of the Zurich group demonstrates.
Hmm…. It still took them nearly 2 months to pay the claim!
I wonder how many of those words prompt settlement and service, you’ll see on price driven television insurance adverts or the Internet insurance marketing campaigns of today!
Related posts:
The good old days of insurance marketing by print.
Our company has been doing insurance websites for over 11 years but we evolved from a print company. We saw the advent of the internet back in the 1990′s and how it would revolutionise how people buy insurance. But more selfishly we feared and anticipated that it would destroy our print business which at that time mainly printed insurance brochures and application forms.
And sure enough the internet lead to a dwindling of insurance printing.
But I still look back with misty eyes to the time when insurance was promoted mainly in print on good old fashioned paper – it had a more tangible quality to it back then. I probably shouldn’t say that being a proponent and beneficiary of the internet but it’s true.